Eight Was Enough

Who really won the Iowa caucuses? In Comment this week, Hendrik Hertzberg compares the drama last Tuesday night to a semi-legendary college-football game:

Among certain aging East Coast élitists, Iowa prompted memories of the 1968 Harvard-Yale football game. That’s the one in which, with the clock running out and Yale leading 29-13, the underdog Harvard team (with Gore’s roommate Tommy Lee Jones at offensive tackle) somehow scored sixteen points in the last forty-two seconds, inspiring a peerless Harvard Crimson headline: “HARVARD BEATS YALE, 29-29.” In Iowa, who was Harvard? At first glance, Santorum (Penn State ‘80) would seem to have the better claim. He had been ignored in the televised debates, his war chest was below the poverty line, and he was up against an experienced, establishment-supported, well-coiffed, fabulously flush juggernaut. For five months he was last or next to last in a crowded field. Yet in the final fortnight he rocketed from five per cent (in one Iowa poll) to a quarter of the actual vote. RICK BEATS MITT, 25-25, you might say.